not the safest

In today’s notes from the Intelligent Design trial in Harrisburg, PA on Slate the reporter notes the following couple of points which amount to the same thing:

“‘They need at least a couple of different perspectives to appreciate the difference between fact and theory,’ Behe says in his testimony. This is the safest position for ID people to take: What could be more scientific than subjecting a theory to hard scrutiny?”

This is absolutely not a safe position for IDers to take. The reason that no ID papers have been successfully published in peer reviewed scientific journals, and that “star ID witness” Michael Behe’s faculty at the university where he is a professor have basicall disowned his ID ideas is that if you subject “Intelligent” Design to the slightest bit of scientific scrutiny it falls on its face.

Trying to show a difference between fact and theory where it relates to evolution vs “Intelligent” Design would very quickly show that there are actually no facts which back the theory up at all. And that there is no way to prove the central tenet of their pseudo-religion – that an intelligent designer created life. Not to say that it didn’t happen, but it’s not possible to prove, or at least they have never found a way to prove it, and for something to be scientific you have to prove it until someone disproves it. Scientifically subjecting a theory to hard scrutiny is exactly what evolution scientists have done for the last decades. They have come up with refinements to the theory (as happens with all scientific theories) but the general basis of it still holds.

This entry was posted
on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 at 12:37 and is filed under reason.
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